Real Progressive Realism

Britain’s new foreign secretary says he’s a “progressive realist.” Don’t be fooled.

Note: An adapted version of this essay was published in the Washington Post.

“Progressive realism,” according to the Wikipedia article about it, is “a foreign policy paradigm largely made popular by Robert Wright.” That’s me! So in principle I should have been gratified by the recent Foreign Affairs essay “The Case for Progressive Realism,” written by the British politician David Lammy. And I should be close to ecstatic now that Lammy, thanks to the Labour Party’s victory in this week’s election, is slated to be Britain’s new foreign secretary.

Yet I’m not feeling festive. It turns out that Lammy’s version of progressive realism isn’t mine. Which, by itself, is OK; the world is full of policy prescriptions that aren’t mine, and many of them work out well. But I don’t think Lammy’s version of progressive realism will work out well.

In a sense, it’s already demonstrated that. Lammy depicts his foreign policy vision as new, but it’s pretty much the same vision that has long guided his party and comparable western parties, including the Democratic Party in America. And this vision is, in critical respects, not very different from the neoconservatism that has dominated Republican foreign policy for most of the past few decades. Lammy’s progressive realism is one of the several variants of Blobthink that have together played such a big role in creating the mess we’re in.

To put a finer point on that mess: We live in a world with a coalescing cold war and raging hot wars, a world with little respect for international law and with eroding international norms. And this has two very bad consequences, one of them immediate and one that will be a slower burn:

1. Extreme volatility. There are two conflicts—in Ukraine and in the Middle East—that are just a miscalculation or two away from becoming regional conflagrations and drawing US troops into them. And one of those wars would put two nuclear superpowers in direct conflict for the first time in world history. Meanwhile, a war in the Pacific between nuclear powers is also becoming thinkable as US-China tensions simmer.

2. Descent toward chaos. Growing international disarray leaves the world too divided to effectively confront momentous planetary challenges that demand a coordinated international approach. These challenges include, famously, mitigating climate change and, less famously, (1) preventing conflict in an increasingly militarized outer space (conflict that, by depriving nations of real-time satellite-based monitoring of an adversary’s military, could induce panic that leads to nuclear war); (2) preventing the various kinds of turbulence and mass suffering that the ungoverned development of artificial intelligence could bring (an especially daunting challenge if that development proceeds in a cold war environment); (3) preventing an unprecedentedly lethal pandemic of the kind that under-regulated biotechnology could bring—whether the cause is an accidental lab leak or the intentional deployment of a bioweapon.

As the world gets more mired in conflict and tension, and the attendant neglect of these issues moves the planet closer to catastrophe, David Lammy is telling us to keep doing what we’ve been doing but to start calling it progressive realism.

To be fair: Lammy’s variant of Blobthink is less pernicious than some other major variants, as I’ll explain.